“She’s not here,” the brother he’d met before snapped in reply. “that is not part of the bargain,” he added.
“Where is she?”
There was silence. He didn’t like to go where his imagination was taking him. He didn’t like to think what had happened to her, what they’d done to her in punishment. If sex with him had been a desperate throw of the dice on her part, it had certainly changed her life. But it was a change that would probably finish it for good, if it hadn’t done so already.
Valentin stopped in the centre of the room and felt the possibilities that faced him diminish. He knew he was beaten. Condemn his son to death, no, that was not possible. “What about an orphanage?” he said suddenly. “Where is there an orphanage?”
The men talked among themselves. “in Damascus. On Khalabbah Street,” one said finally.
“What about here? in Aleppo?”
The men shrugged. Either they didn’t want the boy in Aleppo, or they didn’t know.
Valentin suddenly stopped thinking. “then i’ll take him with me,” he said.
A few minutes later he was walking back down the street carrying the live bundle of his son and when he’d reached a paved street he took a private car that willingly converted to a taxi to take him back to Damascus. He was late, later than he’d planned to be, and he told the driver to hurry. It was a long journey by road.
On the way to the capital he ran through what he would have to do. With the baby in his arms he understood this had been his only choice to save his son. But he also wanted to tell someone else, not just leave the boy abandoned at an orphanage. If one other person knew, he considered, then he would be able to leave the country with a clearer mind.
There was one person he thought he might trust—just possibly. It was crazy, he knew that. After all, he was an officer in Soviet foreign intelligence. But he knew that the only person he could trust with the knowledge of his son was the wife of his head of station in Damascus, Natalia resnikova. She was a good woman, a caring person. He believed she might understand. She was pregnant with a child of her own, after all. It would be born less than a year after his son had been born. That is what he decided to do, no matter the risk.
Having made his decision, the only other thing that preoccupied him on the journey to the capital was that his son didn’t have a name.
When the car reached Damascus, they drove to one of the poorest parts, to the east of the city. Behind a concrete area that served as a basketball court in a flat, grey suburb on the fringe of the capital, he dismissed the driver. Then he walked until he found Khalabbah Street. The houses were new here—mostly cheap, concrete, barely functional buildings to accommodate the influx of people coming in ever greater numbers from the countryside to work in the city. There was construction work going on over the whole area; cement dust rose in a mist from the rear of a truck; a bulldozer was piling the broken remains of old, destroyed houses into a heap.
Despite the noise of construction, his son seemed capable of sleeping forever.
He saw the workmen were wearing white cloths to protect their necks against the heat, even now at six in the evening. The noise of machinery and the fumes filled the air around the waste ground they were clearing in order to put up more concrete housing blocks.
Valentin walked on through the dust until he reached an older building on Khalabbah Street made of yellowing stone. A former school or government building, perhaps? But whatever it was in its former life, it was now the orphanage. It was quieter here.
He put his son down in the shade under a portico at the entrance and took out a piece of paper. On it he wrote in Arabic: “this boy has no parents. Please look after him.” they would know it was a foreigner’s writing, and that bothered him momentarily. Then he sucked the pen for a moment and wrote again. “His name is Balthasar.” Balthasar. He hadn’t been able to think of a name throughout the journey from Aleppo, but now it had come to him in a moment. He liked the name. God protect the king. They had dramatic names and that was one of its meanings, in any case. Then he looked for some way of alerting the people inside the building. He found a bellpull made of old cord hanging at the side of the door and pulled on it. He heard a distant chime. Then he walked swiftly away. Whoever ran the orphanage would be accustomed to the ring that announced the abandonment of another child.
He walked for a mile back towards the centre of the city and finally found himself at the russian embassy compound. The White Houses, the russians called the compound, in an unconcealed expression of racist superiority.
His mind, he found, was blurred, vague, as if he were in a film of himself rather than being the real valentin viktorov. But he went straight to the house of his head of station and rang the bell before he lost his nerve. There was no point in delaying.
It was the maid who answered the door. He asked for Natalia resnikova. Resnikov’s wife finally came to the door and invited him inside. She was an elegant, beautiful woman, but her eyes were usually shaded with sadness. Married to resnikov, valentin wasn’t surprised. He smiled ner vously at her and she returned his expression with calm, uncritical serenity. Then she nodded at him sympathetically. He liked this woman and, he liked to believe, she had a soft spot for him, too.
Valentin saw at once that they were alone. He was relieved that his head of station, Colonel resnikov, was in his study as usual, probably drinking foreign whisky. He would be able to be alone with resnikov’s wife and she was a good woman, a good person. They sat and took tea in a shaded patio at the rear of the house. When the maid had gone, valentin told her everything, the night in Aleppo, the woman and their child.
She didn’t reply at first. There was a silence, but it wasn’t awkward. Then she called the maid and valentin thought that she was going to betray him, but she simply asked for her knitting to be brought. He noticed the bump of her stomach that had grown in the past month, and she saw him looking.
“They will be almost the same age,” she said simply. “I believe I will have a girl.”
“Just a year apart,” he said. “What will you call her—if she’s a girl?”
“I’d like to call her Anna.”
Valentin knew that although Natalia resnikova was a charitable woman, her kindness drew disapproval, disgust, or even wrath from her husband. She was brave to even see him. Resnikov was a hard, bitter man who seemed to gain pleasure from nothing, even the Western whisky he somehow got his hands on.
The maid brought her knitting onto the verandah. The pregnant wife of his boss showed him what she was making. “it’s a sweater for my baby,” she said. “i’ll make another one for your son. Then they’ll have the same.”
He nodded his thanks, suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that now his son would be a real citizen of the world, with a sweater made specially for him, not just an abandoned child living off hand-me-downs.
“And when Anna is born she and I will visit your son when they are both old enough,” Natalia resnikova said. “Until then, I will go alone when I can. I know the orphanage quite well.” She finally touched his arm. “it’s a good place. And you did the right thing.”
Such unexpected understanding made valentin’s eyes moist with relief as well as with the grief he felt for his encounter with the doomed woman dancer and, finally, underlying all, for the birth of his son whose life or death he had held so recently in his hands.
Chapter 1
JANUARY 8, 2010
THE BLACK S-CLASS STRETCH MERCEDES crossed beneath the Moscow ring road on Entuziastov at just after 5:30 in the morning. It was snowing harder outside the city, or maybe that was just how it seemed to the men inside the car. Away from the protection of the city’s buildings, the snow was free to hurl itself across the open landscape and a whirlwind of large, fluffy snowflakes rolled out of the eerie, monstrous white void only to disintegrate as they raced into the car’s heated windscreen.
With the ring road behind it, the official car kept up the same steady, regulation speed and moved on to the M-7 heading northeast out of Moscow in the direction of Balashiha.
There were two intelligence chiefs sitting on the soft, sweet-smelling black leather of the backseat and a
